There are several applications in which a user may be required to enter data by way of an on-screen keyboard, or “soft” keyboard. Typically, an on-screen keyboard is a user interface that displays the most commonly used keys of a standard keyboard. Data is entered by navigating a selector (e.g., a cursor or highlight) to select a key and activating a button to enter a character associated with the selected key. Some character entry user interfaces may display only a single alphanumeric character from a list that may be scrolled to change characters for selection. The list is scrolled to select the desired character and the selected character can be entered by actuation of a button.
But navigating the on-screen keyboard can be a slow and burdensome process because when a character key is selected, the position of the selector is simply placed at the beginning of a list of characters or it remains at the location of the most-recently selected character. When multiple characters are sequentially selected (a character string) to search for a particular item containing the character string, no anticipation of a subsequent character that may be selected is computed, so the user is usually required to execute several navigation actuations to select each character.